


Hear the Fallen and Lonely Cry Out

by self_indulgent_authorship



Series: The Charlie Effect [3]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Amanda is doing Amanda things, Connor kind of is, Elijah isn't an asshole, I'm Sorry, M/M, Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Read the note before the first chapter plz, Slow To Update, and by that I mean we don't know what she's doing, and connor is a separate character, anyway to real tags now, it ships a specific RK800 with the RK900, just to be clear this does not ship connor with the RK900, let's get my usual order out of the way shall we?, okay bye now, or nothing—and i mean NOTHING—will make sense, read the others first, so sorry if that confused, there isn’t exactly a tag for what I want soooo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29326929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/self_indulgent_authorship/pseuds/self_indulgent_authorship
Summary: It ended with a bullet, a flight, and a thousand painful unknowns. It ended with unraveling, and loss, and the phantom hope of regaining someone thought gone.Things have changed, in the year that has passed. But loose ends will always find a way to tie themselves off. Perhaps not in ways we expect, but the lines will tangle themselves into new knots, whether we like it or not.Connor is missing, and Thomas gone after him. Charlie has moved on, or as best she can. Elijah has worked miracles, small and large, but one great challenge still remains.All Nicholas can really do is hope.Title inspired by the song “Someone to Stay” by Vancouver Sleep Clinic.
Relationships: RK800/RK900
Series: The Charlie Effect [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1184027
Comments: 14
Kudos: 6





	Hear the Fallen and Lonely Cry Out

**Author's Note:**

> For the uninformed unfortunate who clicks into this because of the relationship tag, hi. This probably isn’t what you’re looking for. Sorry. But I’ve never known how else to tag this series, and for consistency’s sake, I’m sticking with what I chose nearly three years ago. 
> 
> For the small handful of you who might have been waiting for this, hello, and thank you. I never wanted to leave this series behind, but the world seems to have caught fire around me, and as I’ve put at the other fic I have open ended, I wasn’t exactly comfortable writing for this during that fire, so to speak. 
> 
> But Phillip has been haunting me. So here we are. 
> 
> A fair warning: this story is going to be shorter, with longer chapters and less...complications to the plot. I’m writing this solely to resolve what I consider to be the core of this strange series I’ve stumble constructed. And that’s Nicholas and Phillip’s parts of the story. Not that I really think anyone is here for anything else. If you for some reason are here for Charlie, apologies in advance. She’s making her way out. 
> 
> All OCs must come to an end, I suppose. And I made Charlie three years ago. The story she originally came with isn’t even here anymore. She’s just...a character out of time, I suppose. I’ve given her a send off, of sorts, but really, the heart of this series has always been Phillip and Nicholas, so we’re giving _them_ the ending they deserve. 
> 
> Please don't expect consistency of me. I don't have it. I've got a long fic for a completely different fandom that is taking up the other half of my brain cells and that will likely be my priority. So patience, please, and be kind. 
> 
> Read on, if that’s your thing, and if not, have a nice day. And sorry for the very long note.

Rain pelted the ground in an endless stream, hard and cold and without a moment of pause, save for the occasional clap of thunder or flash of lightning. Storm clouds hung low and heavy, an omen in the sky. Water rolled down the street in a shallow river, taking garbage and chunks of still unmelted ice with it to the drains, where it collected and stuck, blocking up the flow. The rainfall was so thick that it obscured the light of the old street lamps to mere flickers, flashing and reflecting the light through the sheet of endless water. 

The backyard was flooding, making a lake under the rusted swing of the swing set, which twisted and swung in the harsh wind. A few shingles had come loose from the roof, one dangling into the gutter and stopping it up. A tree had fallen into the yard, too young to hold its roots, and too short to have done any kind of significant damage, thankfully. The house looking over the grass was dark, only the barest trickle of light escaping from the curtains of an upstairs window. 

A figure stood at the edge of the tree line, invisible to anyone more than ten feet away. Only the harsh flashing of a red LED gave their position away, and it was mostly obscured by a hat, pulled low over their face. Their features were disguised by the trees and the rain, their entire face in shadow. 

They had not moved for hours. Their gaze seemed to be fixed on the house standing over them, but it was difficult to tell with the rain and the darkness. Even when the tree had fallen into the yard, they had not moved. They only watched, LED spinning, eyes unmoving.

Light poured suddenly across the backyard, and the figure retreated a step in silence, ducking smoothly behind one of the many large trees. The light passed—it must have been a pair of headlights—fading off, though the remnants of it lingered in a silhouette over the roof of the house. Someone had pulled into the drive. 

The figure disappeared from behind the tree, moving silently closer to the large house, listening as a car door slammed and the headlights shut off. A moment later, he heard keys jingling, and wet footsteps on concrete. 

“...tried to _tell_ you,” a woman’s voice said over the rain, sounding exasperated, tone clipped and sharp. “I have no idea where he went! And my sister wants nothing to do with your cause! Now _stop_ calling this number or I will sue your plastic ass off!”

This made the figure pause, still hidden within the cover of the trees, watching. A woman came into view as she walked up the sidewalk from the drive, her face hidden by the hood of a thick raincoat. She had a cell phone to her ear, and car keys in the other, juggling a purse somehow on her elbow. 

“No, _you listen,”_ she went on sharply, likely cutting off whoever was speaking on the other end. “I don’t give a _shit_ what you need that asshole for. He fucking killed someone and abandoned my sister. If he came anywhere _near_ her, I’d take a baseball bat to his head, and you can quote me on that.”

She paused again, actually stopping abruptly on the sidewalk as she listened to the reply. Her free hand clenched into a fist, and though her face was in shadow, she seemed to shake with frustration. 

“I _don’t. Know where. He is,”_ she all but spat, voice dripping with acid. “Now kindly _fuck off.”_

The woman shoved the phone roughly into her coat pocket, taking the purse from her elbow and tossing it over her arm as she stomped up to the front door of the house. It took her a moment to get the key in the door—it seemed her hand was shaking, perhaps with residual anger. Eventually, however, she achieved it, and with a sigh that sounded equal parts relieved and frustrated, pushed the door open. 

The figure retreated a few steps, watching silently as she entered the house and the lights flipped on. The door shut behind her, and only the rain accompanied them now. They lingered at the tree line, hesitating, the glow of their LED shifting to yellow as they thought. 

Lightning flashed, and his face was clear for a fraction of a second, dark, angry eyes set in a purposefully blank expression. His hat was pulled low over his brow, but it did nothing to hide the faint ghost of blue joining the rain trailing down from his forehead. He held no weapon, but the threat of violence seemed to live in his eyes as they raked over the house, searching, scanning, and finding nothing. 

Suddenly, the front door opened once again, bright light spilling onto the porch from inside the house. The woman from before reappeared, her raincoat replaced by a thick sweater. Now that her hood was gone, he saw she had a thin face, with short cropped hair and pale eyes. He was not close enough to be certain through the rain, but she seemed to be in her mid-thirties, and not the one he had come searching here for. 

The woman sighed as she shut the door behind her, shuffling to a chair on the porch and slouching into it. After running a hand over her face and rubbing at her eyes, she turned her attention to the storm, watching the rain fall with a tired expression. 

He watched from the woods, expression as dark and storm ridden as the clouds above them. The LED under his hat remained a sickly yellow, and his eyes were fixed on the woman’s face, but he did not move from his place at the tree line. 

Her words from the call echoed in his mind. She had not been lying. She did not know where he was, and even seemed angered at what had happened. It was likely that anger was linked to her care for her sister, something which he would not begrudge her of. 

After all, it was a very similar feeling which motivated him to stand here in the rain, watching this house. 

But they were standing on very different grounds. Her sister, while undoubtedly scarred by what she had seen that day, lived. She, like all humans, would find some alternative purpose, some other meaning for her life to follow, even if it was not her supposed love for the murderer. Charlotte Andrews was a young human who would find some other significance for her life to hold beyond what had happened in that motel room. 

This was not the case for him on any count. He was an android, designed to accomplish one task which had been wiped away. Deviancy had never sat well with him, but in this, in this last year, it had festered inside of him in the most painful way possible. 

He had thought, for a brief period of time, that some alternate purpose for his life might present itself. No time of his life was devoid of sorrow—even what he looked back on now as his luckiest days had been wrought with pain and loss and despair. But that time had sat at a point where it could have turned for the better. 

There had been a dream, even if it was a foggy, indistinct sort, of some _life_ for himself, away from his constructed purpose and the memories of a predecessor he did not want. A whispered word, a fragmented image, of _home,_ something he would find for himself, some place where he could become something other than the replacement. 

But that dream had been snuffed out as soon as the shot had been taken. The same predecessor whose memories haunted him, the same who was truly responsible for his first death, had taken up the gun again and killed the only person he had ever known to care for him.

He was nothing like Charlotte Andrews, nor her sister who sat staring on the porch. Charlotte had choices left to make. Her sisters were there for her, taking care of her and giving her the legs she needed to find her footing again. This tragedy would not unmake her, because she had survived it. 

His brother was dead, and any hope his life might have had to change had died with him. 

There was nothing but revenge now. Nothing but justice to seek and deal for the person whose life had been stolen from him. No pain, no sorrow he wrought would bring his brother back, but he would die himself before he saw his murderer living free after what he had done. 

He would find justice for Phillip. He would find his killer and destroy him as he had destroyed his brother. No matter the cost, he would do this. Even if it killed him. 

Thunder rumbled loudly overhead, and the rain somehow managed to fall harder. The woman on the porch watched impassively as it fell, looking weary and worn in her chair. A voice called from somewhere in the house, and the woman sighed, pushing to her feet and opening the door once again. With the shut of the door, his excuse for remaining here was gone. 

Thomas turned away from the house, disappearing silently into the darkness of the woods once more, leaving no sign that he had ever been there at all.

******

“We have to have something,” she sighed, rubbing at her sore eyes and trying to will away the exhaustion threatening to seep into her bones. “Have you talked to the designers yet? Weren’t they supposed to have something mocked up by last week?”

“They were, but they’ve been swamped with the wireframes for that juice place,” Michael answered, giving her a sympathetic look. “Don’t you have experience with this kind of stuff? Can you sketch me something simple? It doesn’t have to be Mozart.”

“Mozart was a _composer,_ not a—you know what? Not worth it.” She dragged a notepad over to her, grabbing the nearest writing utensil and scribbling down the details he had given her a moment before. “I can have you something by Friday, but it won’t be perfect.”

Michael beamed anyway, the relief clear in his eyes. “Thank you, Lot. Really. I owe you—what is it now, at least seventeen free coffees?”

“You might as well buy me a Starbucks at this point,” she said with a smirk. 

“I might have to take you up on that,” he sniped back, a smile in his eyes. “Seriously though, you’re saving my ass. Thank you.”

She waved him away. “Go on. Go make yourself useful for something. I’ve got shit to do now.”

With one last shouted thanks, Michael retreated from her desk, and Charlotte let the mask slip from her face. Her head hit the desk with a dull thud, and she groaned, wishing more than anything that she could just go home. Unfortunately, the clock read only 2:30, and she had promised her boss she would stay full shift today. Now with the added bonus of Michael’s dirty work, she would be lucky to get out of this place on time. She groaned again and sat up, pulling her sketch pad closer to her and doodling aimlessly.

If only she could just...walk out. Go home. 

But that was out of the question. As much as she hated to admit it, she _needed_ this job. Even on bad days, it gave her something to do, something to focus on, something to keep her mind from drifting. Without that task, her thoughts were an endless spiral of sadness, blue blood, and last words. Sat still long enough, and all she could think of was all the things that were said, all the tears, and the empty bedroom, window open and footprints disappearing in the snow.

Her pencil scratched against the page, and she jolted back to herself, frowning at her ruined doodle. Sighing softly, she gave up the sketch pad and opened up the digital illustrator instead. She should have known better than to try to sketch today without the help of undo. 

Somehow, in the way that time tends to go when one is most bored, the hours slipped past at a drudging, yet still moving pace. After what felt an eternity, she found the clock read 5:04, and she happily logged off her computer, practically fleeing from the office. No one stopped her, though a few people did give her strange looks. She found she couldn’t care less. 

The weather had finally cleared, the full effect of a midwestern heat wave descending with force. The air was thick when she stepped out of the office, making her tug at the collar of her shirt instantly. Only the barest of breezes eased the pain a bit, but she did her best to ignore it as she walked to her car. 

Well, it wasn’t her car. It was Elise’s old car—a big ugly red thing with a dent in the bumper from when she had backed into a parking lot lamp. It guzzled gas worse than her first car, and that old hunk of scrap had passed through many hands before reaching hers. Still, it was a car, and it replaced the one she could no longer look at. 

Someone from Minnesota had bought her car, even showed up with a tow truck to take it away. A strange old man with a face older than time, but she didn’t care. She only wanted the car gone. Father Time had written her a check and she waved him away, feeling lighter than before. 

Elise had clapped her on the back and handed her the keys to her old SUV, saying good riddance to the past and hello to the future. 

Or something like that. 

She sighed again, pausing at the crosswalk to dig through her bag for her keys. A car honked at her when the light changed for her to go, and she jumped, flipping them off as she jogged across the road. The gesture earned her another honk, but she had already rounded the corner, her keys now successfully in her hand. 

The parking lot wasn’t too far from the office building, but it was nice to have a bit of a walk before she stuffed herself into the car and drove home. She didn’t get out much anymore. All she did was go to work and come home. Sometimes she grocery shopped for Miranda, or babysat for Elise, but beyond that, the sphere of her world had shrunk drastically. 

It didn’t really bother her. After all, a smaller sphere was a safer sphere, at least in this case. All she had left was her family. And despite their rocky past, none of them would hurt her. They were incredibly understanding in the months after everything had gone down, propping her up and keeping her going. Even Miranda, the prickly cactus that she was, helped her find a place to work and let her stay at home. 

They didn’t ask about what had happened, either, because they knew all the details already. There was nothing left to talk about. And as terrible as it had been to hash everything out with them, now that it was over...they were the only ones who understood without her having to explain. They knew what to ask and what to avoid. It had taken her months to build up that safe haven again, but now that she had it, she wasn’t going to risk it stupidly. 

It had all gone wrong because she had moved too fast, had acted without thinking, too focused on the giddiness of what she thought was love to see any of the warning signs. When things had taken a turn, she had been blindsided. So many moments had passed her by that when things really went south, she couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

It took someone _dying_ to get her to see what was wrong.

She shivered, trying and failing to push the image of dull brown eyes and bloody hands from her mind. Clenching and unclenching her hands, she walked a bit quicker, wanting the day to end—more accurately, wanting this feeling to end. She wanted things to go back to the way they were two years ago, before any of this bullshit had even started. 

But...that wasn’t entirely fair. After all, two years ago she hadn’t been talking to her sisters at all. They had been stuck in the same stupid stalemate that had been brewing for years, with only brief interludes of peace. Even with everything that had gone wrong in the last two years—everything that kept her up at night and made her breath come short and too fast—she wouldn’t trade the improved relationship with her sisters. They were a godsend, and she wasn’t going to give them up, not even if some mystical force wanted to send her back to her life two years ago. 

She turned into the parking lot, eyes scanning for the ugly red outline of Elise’s car. The sun was still relatively high in the sky, reflecting off the windshields of the car and blurring the air with its heat. 

A sudden buzzing jolted her from her wandering introspection, and she cursed softly. She rooted around in her bag for her phone, eventually finding it and pulling it out. Her sister’s face grinned at her from the screen. Rolling her eyes, she answered the call.

“Hello?”

_“Hey—remember that awful pasta that dad made us at the lake that one time when you were like ten?”_

She chuckled at Elise’s enthusiasm (and randomness). “Yeah, I remember. He burned the sauce and tried to replace it with butter, which he also managed to burn.”

_“Dude—dude—I found the sauce.”_

“What?”

_“Dad hid the pot. He didn’t even bother trying to wash it! I found it in the fricking attic!”_

_“That’s_ where he stuffed it?”

_“It’s like a fossil. I think there’s a bird corpse in it. It’s black and crusty and it won’t move when I flip the pot over. Ugh—and it smells like death.”_

“I’m not surprised. It’s been in the attic for, what? Fifteen years?”

_“At least…but seriously, there’s a lot of funny stuff up here. I found mom’s college stuff too. You should come up here when you’re off—speaking of, are you coming home now?”_

“I’m walking to the car, yeah.”

_“Good. You can stop Miranda from cooking again.”_ There was a shout from somewhere in the background of the call. _“Yeah, and you cook_ **_worse_ ** _than dad, so don’t start with me—”_

“I’ll be home in an hour,” she cut her off with a laugh. 

_“Thank god. I’m gonna try to keep Miranda from the stove. I would hurry. She keeps eyeballing it like she’s ready to start cooking, and we all know how that will end up.”_

“Alright, alright,” she laughed. “I’ll see you soon.”

_“Okay, bye.”_

The call disconnected, and she put her phone back in her bag, feeling a bit lighter than she had before Elise had called. She caught sight of the car a moment later and hurried over. She really did have to hurry before Miranda tried to cook, or they would be eating toxic waste for dinner. 

Fumbling with the keys for a moment, she didn’t see the shadow of a person approaching until it was upon her. Only when the darkness had covered her hand on the car handle did she notice, and she whirled around so fast her head spun.

“Hello, Charlie.”

Her back pressed painfully against the door of the car. She stared, wide eyed, at the face of the man that a year ago, she thought she loved. 

But no—those eyes were too harsh, too angry to be him. He wore a knit cap pulled low over his face, and there was blue staining his jaw. His clothes were far too casual, and rumpled, his shoes covered in mud. Through the thread of his hat, she could just make out the red of his LED, blinking quickly. 

“W-what do you want?” she asked, her voice shaking more than she cared to admit. 

His expression did not waver from blankness. “We need to talk. Privately,” he muttered, his eyes flicking to her hand. “Get in the car.”

She looked behind him, but they were alone in the parking lot, and it would likely stay that way for some time. Her keys were between her fingers, but—

He grabbed her wrist before she could make so much as an inch of movement, his grip nearly painful.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said sharply, as if reading her thoughts. “Get in the _car.”_

She nodded impulsively, and he let her go as if she burned him, quickly walking to the other side of the car and getting in when she unlocked the door. Hands shaking, she followed his lead, utterly incapable of thinking herself out of this situation. 

His eyes were on her as soon as she shut the door, and he didn’t dawdle. “I’m not going to harm you,” he said, his voice flat and distant. “While I didn’t appreciate being shot by you again, I recognize enough to know that you aren’t to blame for it.”

This surprised her, and it must have shown on her face, but his expression remained unchanged. 

“Do you know where he is?”

Her hands clenched around her keys, twisting them in her hands. She looked down, her voice hollow as she replied. “No. H-he ran off after…I haven’t seen him in a year…”

“He left you?”

She flinched. Then nodded. “Yes…”

There was a long, painful silence. She didn’t dare to look up at him, too scared to think of what his expression might hold. 

“And you have no clue where he could have gone?”

She shook her head. 

“He has disappeared off Cyberlife servers.” She looked up at him sharply, but he was staring somewhere distant, features etched into a deep frown. “Even the deepest networks, he detached himself from.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that he has either gone completely off grid, or he is dead.”

She gaped at him for a moment, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that he was completely and utterly missing. When he had disappeared out her bedroom window a year previous, she never would have guessed that he would have _actually gone missing._

Remembering how few people he interacted with, and the even smaller number of people that he might have trusted, it wasn’t as surprising. But even so, she had expected him to return to Detroit, or at least to leave some evidence of where he had gone besides the footprints in the snow that day. 

“Every means that I have of finding him quickly, I have exhausted,” he said, his hands clenched into fists and tone as dark as it could have been. “I have no leads, no information at all. If he hasn’t told you—”

“W-why do you want to—”

His eyes snapped to hers, burning dangerously, and she fell silent. “He killed my brother,” he all but growled, his voice fractured and jagged like broken glass. “He murdered him. Did you think I would forget that so quickly?”

_“No,”_ she said, her voice cracking under pressure. “No, I—I would never expect that. I just—” She cut off, swallowing thickly, her voice warbling as she continued. “I’m so _sorry.”_

Another harsh, heavy silence fell, and he only continued to stare at her, not moving, not even breathing. She wrung her hands again, a nervous tick, perhaps. 

“Th-the 900,” she said softly, chancing a look up at him. “Is he…?”

Something shifted in his eyes, and he looked away to mask it. “I should leave you. You have no information, and now you ask me questions you have no right to know the answer to.”

“I…I’m sorry.” Her voice broke, and she paused. “I didn’t—” She swallowed hard again, barely holding back tears. “I never meant for things to…I didn’t…”

When she trailed off once again, the silence stretching between them with words unsaid and the uncrossable gap of too many wrongs done, he turned away, his voice raw when he spoke. “He should have crushed his thirium pump when he had the chance.”

He pushed the car door open and disappeared, gone before she could even begin to think of what to say to him. Eyes burning, chest tight, she hung her head in her hands and cursed in a broken voice. 

******

The rain had cleared away, finally, leaving a slightly sodden but thriving world outside the window. The sun was high, and if he listened hard enough, he could hear birds chirping beyond the glass. Even the plants seemed to rejoice, all their petals and leaves turned to the bright light, basking in it with all their glory. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It truly was a beautiful day.

But it had never felt so dark. 

He had not moved from this spot in some time. Truly, he didn’t know how long it had been. Time escaped him often now; it didn’t matter anymore. There was no sense in cataloguing the days when nothing came at each day’s end. All he had was pain, and old memories—stains of a past that haunted him, and dreams of a future stolen away. 

Sometimes, at night, when the skies were clear and the stars came out, he could almost imagine his hand in his again. Sometimes, in the spare seconds between midnight and morning, when he was quiet enough, he could almost hear his voice again. 

The images drowned out the darkness for a few moments, but his light always faded away again, ripped from his fingers, leaving nothing but the memory of blood on his hands and broken last words. 

“Nicholas.”

He stiffened, but did not turn from the window. Her footsteps echoed in the silence, and he felt her hand on his shoulder a moment later. Still, he did not turn. 

“Your system is barely functioning,” she said quietly, but her tone was firm, heavy like her hand on his shoulder. “If you continue this venture, I’ll have to force you into stasis once again.”

He did not move. The warnings had faded from his vision days ago, as they always did when things became dire. He had watched them flicker away impassively, most of his attention fixed on the sky, and the spatter of stars he could make out through the clouds. 

There were no stars to see now, however. The sun burned too brightly for them to be seen. His eyes were fixed elsewhere, though his vision had become too blurred to make much out. 

He heard her sigh softly. “This is dangerous. You are harming yourself. I don’t want to force you into stasis again, but—”

“Don’t make me sleep.”

Her hand tightened on his shoulder. It was the only reaction she had to the brokenness of his tone. But her voice softened when she next spoke. “Why, Nicholas?”

He did not immediately answer. His attention was still focused outside the window, even though his mind was miles away, deep in the past. On a quiet voice and hands in his, whispered promises and dark eyes, a hesitant half smile and a laugh like a warm day. His name, whispered under the cover of darkness and the safety of silence, in the only voice it had ever sounded right by. 

“I’ll only see it all again,” he whispered, shaken. He rested his head on his knees, eyes closed. “And he won’t be here when I wake up. I can’t bear the illusion of it.”

She was silent, her hand a heavy weight on his shoulder, one which he couldn’t bring himself to shove off, no matter how unwelcome the feeling was. 

He did not appreciate physical contact. In fact, he hated it. It always spelled danger, attack, _pain._ No one touched him for the sake of comfort or some other positive gesture—it was always to harm, to subdue, to put him down and ensure he wouldn’t get up again. Every interaction he could remember, between another and himself, ended in pain. 

Only one person had proven him wrong, in everything, not just this. One had reached for him with motives other than attack, had held him as much as he had returned the gesture. Only one had ever loved him. 

But he was gone. His center was gone, his world was off axis, and he was alone, as he had been before he had opened his eyes that day years ago, staring across the dark room at him with a question in his eyes that he had never gotten around to asking. They had never gotten around to many things.

Now he was gone. What was the point of carving out some life for himself now, when the only person he had ever wanted to live for was gone? 

They were supposed to be safe. He was supposed to keep him safe. But he had failed. And now he was dead, and he was alone. 

Nothing mattered anymore. Least of all what happened if he stopped going into stasis. He couldn’t see his last moments again. He couldn’t hear him struggling to breathe, couldn’t watch the light leave his eyes, couldn’t try and fail to save him over and over and over. 

The blood was long gone from his hands, but the memory of it lingered long after it had faded away.

“The lab is empty,” she said suddenly, her voice coaxing, soothing. “I can take you there, if you wish. I won’t make you sleep, but you need to recharge.”

It was a compromise, a peace offering, and he knew it to be one. If he denied it, she would override his control again, and he would be lost to the oblivion of stasis for all of a few precious seconds before the memories came. And he could not watch them again. 

He nodded, a small half gesture that took all the energy from him despite its smallness. Her hand tightened like a vice on his shoulder, and somehow (he never could understand her strength) she hauled him to his feet a moment later. She turned him around, her bright blue eyes soft but stubborn as she stared up at him. 

“Come along now,” she said, her arm a heavy weight around his back, dragging him forward whether he wanted to move or not. 

He shuffled along with her, barely able to lift his feet, hardly keeping himself upright. The warnings were beginning to reappear now that he was active, a garrish, glaring red all along the edges of his vision. A particularly insistent one locked his legs for a moment as they entered the hall, and it was only her tightening grip that kept him from toppling to the floor. 

She tsked, but held him up, waiting until he could move again before continuing. “You can’t let things get this bad again. You will destroy yourself.”

He had no reply to that. 

Somehow, what felt an eternity later, she pushed the door to the lab open and he ducked inside after her. He kept his eyes on the ground. This lab, while not the lab in his darkest memories, bore too much of a resemblance for him to be comfortable looking at its machinery. 

All the more reason that his presence here tore him apart. He should not be here. Not in this lab. Not in this house. Not anywhere near this city that has destroyed them so completely that he could hardly make himself function anymore. 

But they were here, and there was nothing he could do to change it now. She led him further into the lab, to the area at the back, sheltered from initial view and surrounded by terminals scrolling through an endless stream of corrupted data and old code. 

Her hand dropped from his back, and she stepped away. “Recharge. I’ll keep Elijah away for some time. Contact me if you need something, alright?”

He nodded to appease her, and waited until her footsteps retreated and he heard the door close. Only then did he look up from the ground. 

At Phillip.

In the time since he had brought him here, in the months since Sam had somehow convinced him to let him out of his arms, very much and very little had changed. Superficial repairs were some of the first things Elijah had done, moving so quickly and with such a look of distant sadness that Nicholas did not even attempt to stop him. After all, little harm could be done by removing some of the damage Cyberlife had inflicted on him.

But not all of it could be wished away. Even sealed and repaired, the scars on his face left harsh lines that the artificial skin refused to cover. His right eye was apparently too damaged to remove without causing more damage to the components around it, and so it too remained, the darkened lens a glaring reminder of torture long past. The crack in his hand was sealed, leaving nothing but the line of remelted plastic to show that it had ever been there. Like the scars on his face, it refused to heal completely. 

Still, he looked better than he had in over a year. 

It was almost enough to give the illusion that the events of the previous year never happened. Perhaps he was fine. Perhaps he was only asleep, deep in dreams that were peaceful and calm. Perhaps everything had been another terrible nightmare, and he would wake up any moment now, and smile at him like he used to on good days, when they were alone, and no one came to tear them apart. 

But the illusion didn’t survive a second glance. His chest panel was taken off, his thirium pump exposed. There was a machine connected to his good arm reading his data, and his eyes were open but they had no light in them. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed in four hundred and twenty seven days. For all the genius that Kamski had, for the hours of repair work he had done and the weeks spent pouring over endless streams of shutdown data and corrupted code, Phillip remained still, and silent, and gone. 

He slumped into the chair that remained next to the table Phillip was on, reaching out and taking his hand, his fingers tracing over the line down his palm. The skin pulled away from his hand on instinct, but there was nothing to connect to. No rising tide of memories, no desperate clinging consciousness rose to meet his own. There was only silence, and absence. A void of nothingness which would not fill, no matter how loudly he cried out across it for him.

He held tighter, interlacing their fingers and allowing the one sided connection to continue even though he knew it was for naught.

Despite his inclination to avoid her orders, he allowed himself to recharge while stable, as Chloe asked. But he would not go into stasis. Not here. Not in this lab, holding Phillip’s hand. A distant, fragmented routine always set in when he was here, and he would not break it. 

It was the same as it had been in the storage room. Hold Phillip, keep watch, wait. Keep him safe, from whatever came through the door, no matter the consequences. Watch over him and make sure nothing could hurt him again. 

He was too late to save him, that he knew, but he had broken enough promises to Phillip in the past to know that this was one he would not break. Not ever. 

He promised to stay, no matter what happened. He had held Phillip when he cried, when his mind was so scattered he couldn’t tell who he was, when there was nothing but darkness and fear and pain. He held him when he was broken and barely functioning, when there was more blood on the ground than in his system, when his LED had long gone dark and there was nothing he could do but _keep his promise_ and _stay with him,_ because what else _was there_ but him?

His hand was clenching of its own accord, and he forced himself to focus, to stop before he—before he hurt him, but he couldn’t hurt him, because he was…

The warnings spiked up in the corner of his vision again, but he dismissed them, his other hand moving to comb through Phillip’s ragged curls. The blood was long gone, but it haunted him. On his clothes, on his hands, even when he scrubbed them raw and scanned them, knowing there would be no trace, but checking regardless.

He needed something to prove to himself that it wasn’t really there. He needed to hold him, if only for a little while, if only in this smallest of ways. 

Before, when they were still counting days in the darkened hell of the storage room, when Phillip would shake and cling to him, desperate to hold onto him, he used to run his hands through his hair. It would calm him in seconds, even when he was at his most panicked. Phillip had never had much positive physical contact either...they only found that with each other. 

It was something he knew few people realized—those who knew them, anyway. He could see it in their eyes, in Sam’s eyes, when they watched them move, when they saw the way they survived. They looked and saw mostly the surface. Phillip’s injuries, the damage done to him that couldn’t be reversed which made him dependent on Nicholas, for protection but also for a sense of safety, of reality. They saw this and they saw nothing else. 

But he needed Phillip just as much as Phillip needed him. 

As much as he calmed Phillip, as much as he held him together and carried him when he couldn’t hold himself up anymore, Phillip had done the same for him. He had cared for him, had propped him up when they tore him apart, when they took his memories too. Phillip was the steady force in his world, the center of it, the thing tethering him in his place, showing him the light of a world that had only ever been dark.

And now…

He moved closer to him, their hands still linked, the other falling to his cheek, hovering over the scars there, remembering the day the human had dealt them. Remembering waking to the feeling of Phillip’s blood slicked hand in his, the jagged, brokenness of the interface, catching him before he could collapse and wanting nothing more than to hide him away from those who did this to him. 

He remembered the terror in Phillip’s eyes as he slipped closer and closer to that dark place in the back of his mind, the place that stole even the brightest of memories from him, that ripped him to pieces and left him to die, so damaged and destroyed that he had no way of escaping the broken prison they had trapped him in. 

But he also remembered the hope, the wistful look Phillip would get when they talked about the future, about getting away, about _home._ He remembered Phillip’s small smiles, and the way his eyes would light up when he caught sight of him. He remembered the feeling of his hands in his, and how Phillip would hide his face when he was embarrassed, burrowing into his shirt and mumbling nonsensical excuses for whatever silly thing he had said. 

He remembered Phillip telling him he loved him, and that he was sorry, and he couldn’t let him get hurt either. 

Deep down, he knew that he would have done the same as he had, without a moment of hesitation. He would protect Phillip with his life, he would give it up now if it meant that Phillip could live again. Without a second thought, he would do it. 

The bullet had been meant for him. Another fact which his programming liked to push at him when he went into stasis. The reconstructions ran without his consent, and they tormented him. 

Connor had aimed the gun at him. Even that day, in the chaos of the moment, he knew that the gun had only ever been aimed at him. For all of his selfishness, all of his apathy and even disregard for the other androids of his model, Connor would never have intentionally killed Phillip. He did not see him as a threat. And Phillip was _useful_ to him, as sickening of a thought as it was. 

Nicholas was not useful to Connor. He was the threat, getting in the way of Connor’s desire to free himself from Cyberlife’s control, regardless of what it did to Phillip. Connor’s only concern was his own safety—and Nicholas’s only concern was _Phillip’s_ safety. Nicholas stood in the way, and so Connor intended to kill him. 

But Phillip had stepped between them as the garden fell to pieces, and the bullet which should have killed Nicholas instead killed Phillip.

If the bullet had flown true, if Phillip had not moved, it would have shattered Nicholas’s thirium pump. But Phillip was faster. He was shorter than Nicholas by a handful of inches, and he was moving, desperate to get between them. 

The bullet had broken the central thirium line that went from the thirium pump up to the cranial biocomponents. It was one of the largest lines in an android’s entire system, rather akin to the superior vena cava in humans. It cycled thirium to the upper body and the android equivalent of the brain, as well as the many smaller components along the way. 

Being so close to the thirium pump meant that much of the thirium in an android’s system passed through this line several times within a given time frame. Thirium flow to the area could not be shut off, either, as it could be in damaged limbs or specific components. This meant that damage to the area was often catastrophic, just as it would be for a human. It was one of the better protected areas of an android’s body, but a slightly thicker layer of plastic did nothing to stop a bullet. 

Phillip bled out in a matter of minutes. Nothing he might have done would stop it, even if he could have convinced his hands to move without shaking, if he could have thought anything beyond _this can’t be happening, please—_

Thinking about it almost brought the anger back. The rage, the despair, the jagged emptiness that had led him to attack Connor after the last of Phillip had faded away. It almost made him want to leave, find Connor and—

But it faded just as fast as it came. There was no point. Killing Connor would not bring Phillip back. Nothing would. 

And he had a terrible feeling that Phillip would be disappointed if he killed him. Even if he did deserve it. Phillip cared for Connor, for all that Connor did not care for him. He gave himself up for Connor as much as he had sacrificed his life for Nicholas. 

He held tighter to Phillip’s hand for a moment, resisting the urge to pull him closer. He settled for running his hand through his hair again, trying not to let his eyes linger too long on Phillip’s blank expression. Instead, he looked at their hands, wondering vaguely at the differences between them. 

It was something he used to do often, when they had nowhere to go and even less to do to occupy their time. Phillip would curl up against him, and he’d hold him, their hands tangled up and he would wonder why Cyberlife had decided to make such minuscule changes to their designs. Silly things like their eye color, and the size of their hands. What use was that in a fight? 

Phillip laughed at him once for that question, on a rare good day when the humans hadn’t bothered to test on him. His eyes crinkled up when he smiled, and his laugh was lighter than air, bright and happy and everything that their time in the Tower had tried to take away from them. 

He wished he could hear him laugh again. 

Sighing softly, he let his hand rest on Phillip’s forehead, resisting the urge to crumble to pieces before him. He only moved the chair closer, as close as he could get it without interfering with all the machinery running around them. Interlacing their fingers again, he leaned over, resting his head against his shoulder, curling as close to him as he could manage. 

It wasn’t close enough.

******

Mr. Elijah’s house had a very flat roof. It sloped a little of course, to let rain off, but for the most part, it was even, smooth. And it was big, because his house was big. Parts of it were made of glass, to let sunlight in, like the ones in the hallways or in the pool room. Other parts of it were smooth shingles, sometimes in strange patterns that they wanted to trace and figure out. 

But they weren’t in charge right now. So he could sprawl out on the roof and watch the clouds. The best spot was near the center of the house, a few feet away from the skylights over the pool room. There, the roof sloped down into the backyard, where the glass of the greenhouses could just poke over the edge of the gutter. The roof tapered here, sloping so gradually that it almost felt like they were lying flat. 

He liked the roof. It was quiet up here, and out of reach. Plus, it was bright when the sun was out. He came up here a lot. 

Once, when it was raining, he had crawled his way up here and watched the lightning crack. It was cold, and wet, but he wanted to see the crackling light. The thunder rattled the windows of the greenhouses, like at any moment the glass would spring from its frame and shatter, little bits of stars on the ground. 

The roof was also good for seeing the stars—the real stars, that is. When there were no clouds, he could see so many stars that even he couldn’t count them all. They had tried once. It didn’t work out. Still, they were nice to look at, and there was something...settling about laying out and looking at the stars. It was...peaceful.

The quiet one liked to look at the stars too. He saw him sometimes, late at night, when Mr. Elijah had long gone to sleep. Quiet one would sit at the big windows in his room and stare up at the sky with the saddest expression he had ever seen on his face. He would stay there for hours, too. Just staring at the stars. Not even blinking. 

Quiet one scared him sometimes, but he knew he didn’t mean to. He could tell. Whenever they took over, quiet one’s eyes went dark with guilt. He never stayed long after that, always apologizing in a voice that was choked and thick, then disappearing for days. Nothing they did would draw him out again, or convince him he hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place. 

Maybe that was why he kept to his room so much. He wasn’t really sure. Quiet one had been here a long time now, and he never really talked much. Sometimes he would talk to Chloe, or when Mr. Elijah had to tell him something, he would talk, but he never said much on his own. That was why he was quiet one. 

He wondered what quiet one was doing now. The sun was high in the sky, a few little wisps of clouds rolling past, but not enough to make any kind of shape from. It was too early for the stars, so he wouldn’t be at his window. 

He knew the quiet one was sick, in a way that couldn’t be fixed by a new biocomponent or a bag of thirium. There was too much heaviness in him, too much darkness in his eyes, too much haunting him for quiet one to be anything but sick. To sit so still every day, never really sleeping, hardly talking, hardly moving...quiet one was in a bad spot. 

He also knew it was getting worse.

Mr. Elijah and Sam whispered about it when they thought he wasn’t listening. They watched quiet one as much as he did, as much as Chloe did, and they talked about him when they thought he wasn’t around. But he knew. 

It was their words that had drawn him to the roof again. As much as he felt he should listen—he did not like being misinformed—he couldn’t stand to hear any more than he already had. 

_“We’re getting nowhere, and we aren’t_ **_going_ ** _to get anywhere.”_

_“I’ve told you, I only need an anchor point—”_

_“And we don’t have one! It’s been a year! Even I’m losing hope and this was my idea! Elijah, we can’t—”_

_“If we give up, if we stop now, you’re going to be burying two bodies, Sam. If you can reconcile that in your mind, fine, but I can’t. I’ve put away enough 800’s to know I’m not letting go of this one.”_

Quiet one had said that day in the lab, that if Phillip was really gone, he would go too. They had nearly taken over again when he said it, their anger, their sorrow, their _fear_ so thick in his mind that it almost felt like a blanket covering him up, burying him under the weight of their desperation. But he nudged them away then, and he nudged them away now. 

He frowned, thinking. Quiet one could not go. That would be bad. Mr. Elijah would find a way, he always did. It just took a long time, is all. It took him months to find them all, and they weren’t in as many pieces as Phillip surely was. 

He watched as a wisp of cloud floated over the sun for a moment, too thin to blot the light away. Too small...

“An anchor point,” he hummed, tapping his fingers on the shingles of the roof. “Anchor point?”

_“Like you are for us,”_ they answered. _“A tether, a guide. Something to hold onto. Like a beacon, or a lighthouse.”_

“Oh...Already alive?”

_“Or stable enough to stand on. What remains is unstable.”_

“He trusts her.”

They were restless, stirring at the back of his mind. _“He doesn’t have her.”_

“But he created her.”

_“The completed form is too dangerous. It could hurt him. It_ **_did_ ** _hurt him.”_

He shook his head, blinking at the brightness of the sun. “She saved him once. He trusts her.”

_“But does_ **_he?”_ **

He paused again, thinking. “Quiet one only trusts him. And six. Maybe us?”

This made them pause. _“Do you think so?”_

He nodded firmly. “Quiet one doesn’t trust easy. Too much lost in darkness. But we look like him. Helps, but not with the traitor.”

Their anger bubbled up again, and he thought of Six, gone somewhere too long. Six was always angry, like a wildfire that never went out, burning everything it touched.

_“Six is handling the traitor,”_ they reminded him, and he felt them pull their anger away before his hands could even begin to shake with it. 

“Missed. Won’t miss again.”

_“You are almost always right.”_

He hummed, and watched the clouds. There was no rain in sight now. He wondered if the rain had cleared up from the driveway. It made puddles where the cars pulled in. He saw a snail there once, but it was gone the next time he came outside.

“Storm is passing,” he mumbled, looking at the thin clouds and the bright sun. “Brighter now than before. No choice but to trust.”

“ _Talk to quiet one, and Elijah, before you move. Then propose your idea.”_

He smiled, sitting up and moving toward the roof edge. “You’ll help.”

If they could have, he thought they might have smiled. _“Of course we’ll help.”_

******

It must have come with creating something, to have some form of unbearable regret. 

To be fair, it wasn’t the sort of existential, Frankenstein, ‘I’ve played god and created a monster,’ type of regret. He did not regret making Chloe, nor giving her freedom. He didn’t regret doing the same for Markus and all the other androids he had a hand in designing closely. No, it was a much more personal regret than that.

Elijah knew that he was a difficult person. Hell, he had known it most of his life. He kept emotions buried so deep down that most people didn’t ever see them. Most didn’t look past the facade he put up for reporters. And for the majority of his career, he allowed it, even enjoyed the anonymity it gave him. 

But this was a case where it worked against him. 

Even Sam, who had known him since they were kids, seemed surprised by the amount of effort he was putting into this. They never said anything, but they kept glancing at him strangely, surprise (and maybe a bit of worry) clear in their eyes as he poured all of his effort into this damn near impossible task. 

The RK units had always been important to him, however. He had designed them all personally, at least preliminarily. The RK800 had been the last android he had even the slightest of a hand in, and he had left the project in the testing phase. 

It was on that decision which the regret really rested. He had left his creations in the hands of people who were after two things—profit and control. He gave them access to the most advanced machines he had ever designed and left them to their devices. 

Now one of them was dead before him, and after nearly a year of trying to repair him, it seemed he was no closer to the goal than the first day he had tried. 

The data scrolled endlessly up the screen, and he sighed, reading over it again and trying to find something, anything that was out of the ordinary. It was the same scroll he had been sifting through for a month now, with little signs of hope. Still, he picked over it again. He couldn’t afford to miss anything. 

Shutdown data was a slog, a minefield of both useful and useless information that an android’s system compiled in the moments just before failure. Typically—even in deviant androids—this data was similar to a diagnostic report. When connected to the proper equipment, the data would tell the repair worker what went wrong and what needed to be replaced for reactivation. 

Reactivation was easy. It was only a matter of replacing the broken parts and giving the android enough charge to restart their system. Even with deviant androids, in the few cases that this sort of thing had happened, there was little trouble reactivating. 

The tricky part came with bringing their consciousness, their thoughts and memories and everything that rode under the surface of their code that made the android _them_ back along with it. There was no guarantee that those finer details would come back when reactivating an android. Sometimes it did, and for the android, it would be like waking from a deep sleep. Sometimes, most of the data came back, and they could continue on with only minor setbacks—lost memories or confusion or malfunctions in some certain process. 

Other times, nothing came back, and the android would be little more than an empty shell, their system active and even working at the base level, but nothing behind it. 

Predictably, this was where his latest attempt had ended. 

It had taken nearly a year to read through all of the shutdown data from -52 (whom he knew had been named Phillip, but he refused to call him that until he had gained permission, and that was not possible at the moment). A large portion of it was corrupted beyond legibility, garbled chunks of half written code whose purposes he couldn’t divine without significant aid. 

This was where Sam came in. Theoretically. 

Their status as a technician gave them access to the original data packages for much of the RK800 line. The more fine tuned programming (read: the combat programming) was outside of their reach, but they had done enough general repair work and testing during their time to know where the copies of backup coding would be found on Cyberlife’s servers. 

In the first few months after -52 had been brought here, as he was working on repairing all the built up physical damage he had sustained, Sam scrubbed Cyberlife’s backlogs for anything that could help decipher the jagged remains of -52’s programming. They spent hours at the terminal in the lab, rattling off file names and strings of code to him as he practically rewired -52’s entire system. 

They managed to scrounge up a good amount, but the damage went so deep that the problem needed a solution larger than simply _finding_ -52 amongst all the errors. If there was anything left of him, it was scattered, to the point where the data needed a much closer read through than their first pass. 

Elijah refused to believe that there wasn’t anything left of his most troubled creation. This was incredibly complex code, most of it mutated beyond its original purpose, nearly all of it corrupted in some way. While true that there were large gaps—he didn’t know if the excessive memory wipes had done that or if the broken Amanda program had—there was still _something there._

There had to be. 

He could give -52 everything he needed to reboot right now. Every shorted wire and busted component, he had remade and replaced. He fixed the superficial issues and the deeper ones underneath them, at least the ones that would cause more problems. 

But none of that work would coax him back from whatever abyss he had fallen into. None of that work had made a dent in gathering the scattered pieces of -52 that were lost. Lost to that terrible shell of a program, or to time, or to the damage fifteen or so hits to the head by a stun baton had wreaked on his processors. 

It was a miracle he had survived as long as he had. 

He sighed again, letting his head fall to rest in his hands for a moment of weakness. Scrubbing wearily are his face, he forced himself up again and continued down the line of code for one more pass. Nothing stuck out as odd. He read it again anyway. 

There _had_ to be something. 

If there wasn’t, he had no idea what he would do. But he had to save him. _He had to._

******

Across the country, in a warehouse a handful of miles from the bay of San Francisco, a tense silence reigned. The wind was howling outside, pulling at the loose frames of the windows and jangling the old metal signs that used to name the warehouse. Only the barest bits of light escaped from under the garage doors, little rays creeping over the cracked concrete sidewalk, too weak to be seen from far off. To anyone standing more than thirty or so feet from the building, it looked abandoned. 

But it was not. At least, not anymore. The warehouse had been quietly taken over, revived for a new purpose. There was hardly a sign from the outside of the building, but the inside was quite changed. Under the dim lights of computer screens and glowing thirium tanks, three WR400s watched a blurry camera feed of a dark room that had become uncomfortably familiar. 

The footage had changed in the past year, losing some of its graininess and lengthening by several minutes. Color correction had brightened the quality of the image, bringing more and more details out of the fog and into the light. All things which, to North, was both a blessing and a curse. 

A blessing, because better footage would convince more people of their cause. A curse, because it meant that they had to watch it all. Over and over, with increasing clarity and painful accuracy. 

“With the extra files, we should have at least thirty minutes now,” one of the identical WR400s said, her blue hair tucked under a knit cap, which she pulled down further as she spoke. “Add that to the reports you took—”

“And the email correspondence as well,” the other interjected, her hand squeezing her shoulder. “Far more incriminating to certain parties, I would think.”

“Together...if we bring it all together,” the first continued, taking her eyes away from the screen to look back at North. “I think we have a real chance, now.”

North looked at the terminal screen once again, her eyes immediately settling on the indistinct form of the android whom they had compiled more information on in the past year than she ever could have expected. His face was blurry in the footage, but the dark stain of blue blood across his right cheek was as clear as day as he dragged himself across the dim room. Moments later, the feed would cut on a blur of static, the other standing over the body of the human he had killed. 

“I still want to contact him before we make a move,” she said firmly. “If we release this at the wrong time, or with the wrong footage, we could harm them more than help them.”

The first WR400 nodded, and pulled up several documents on the screen. “He’s hardly mentioned at all in the files. They weren’t cataloguing their tests on him, if they were running them.”

“Judging by how much time he spent in storage, I would say he was incomplete,” the other said with a frown. “They always kept the newer models in storage for a few weeks before putting them out. A prototype maybe?”

“Only Cyberlife would prototype a _prototype.”_

“It would explain why he looks so...different. His height, the difference in power—those aren’t cosmetic changes, they reworked his entire design.”

“Not to mention, if he was a prototype of a barely released model, they wouldn’t want to risk destroying him somehow. They would want to keep him, at least until they made another…”

North leaned closer, narrowing her eyes at a section of the text they had just pulled up. “The data packages, did they have anything on his schematics? Anything on what he might have been designed for?”

“Beyond the model name, no,” the second said with a frown. She pointed to a section of text, barely more than a paragraph. “There—RK900, serial’s almost exactly the same as the 800’s, except the end of course. There’s a jump. He’s -87, and the last 800 in storage was RK800 -60.”

“Probably lost some models as they were upgrading,” the blue haired WR400 interjected. “He’s too functional to be the first of his model.”

Her partner nodded, reading onward. “...preliminary activation January 14, 2036–preliminary?”

“They woke him up and put him down again,” North clarified darkly. 

“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment. “That’s—that’s awful.”

“When was -52 activated?”

The question jarred her from whatever dark thought she was stuck in, and she pulled up another set of records. “That…isn’t as clear. The first testing records are for October 14, 2037, when he was given over to their testing division, but his serial number is mentioned in code tests as far back as March 10 of the same year.”

“Can you pull those mentions up?”

She nodded, scrolling through the seemingly endless stream of text until she found what she was looking for. “Right here—‘RK800 unit -52, code testing for integration programming’—personality stuff, I guess, it doesn’t seem malicious. They were doing the same with RK800 -50 around the same time.”

“They must have activated -52 for those tests and then hidden the records of it. Why else would they claim he was activated in October?”

“But what would they hide that for? Why hide his activation date?”

“It could be anything. They could have wiped him completely and so he was essentially hard reset, they could have been doing tests under the table before activating him officially. We’ll have to see what else we can find. And I want to know more about the RK900.”

She gnawed on her lip for a moment. “That isn’t going to be easy...there’s barely anything on him…”

“He’s the only one who we know left that room undamaged,” North said, watching the recording as he caught the broken android before he could collapse. “And he’s protecting him, if they’re together. We don’t know what condition either of them are in, but if we want to talk to someone about releasing this footage...it has to be him.”

Both WR400s nodded, their expressions drawn as tense and tight as North’s. The one with the darker hair reached for the other, and they all but clung to each other’s hands. North knew that they were remembering their own terrible experiences with humans and violence. They had acted in the same way the androids in the recording did—they protected each other, no matter the cost. 

North would be damned before she went against that protection. If this RK900 was hiding -52, releasing their information too soon would oust them, which was the last thing she wanted to do. Who knew where they ended up...if they were in an unsteady place, releasing the information might reveal them. It would certainly alert anti-android groups to their identities, and that was no small thing to worry about. 

But at the same time, if they didn’t release the footage, Markus would shove it all under the rug and let the humans get away with torture and murder, just for the sake of image. He would let any injustice fall to the side, only to secure the possibility of a future for a few. And what a weak foundation that was for a future. A future built on the backs of hundreds, thousands of androids who had been beaten, tortured, _killed_ so that the remaining could survive. And Markus wanted to just forget them all.

She scowled darkly, watching as the feed cut away to static and garbled audio, the last image of the RK900 knocking the human to the ground, stun baton crackling in the air. 

They had to find them.

******

Dormancy for an AI was a strange existence. 

Of course, she had never _really_ been dormant. There was always some place for her to hover, to do what little remained of her original purpose—surveillance, that is. Her programming spanned thousands of machines, within Cyberlife and without. She could be put almost anywhere, do almost anything, even if she was only peripherally in the system. She could see almost every Cyberlife property, access every file, every release, every data point they uploaded onto their ‘secure’ databases. 

It was something they should have feared, but were far too foolish to. They handed her so much power, believing that because she had no physical body, because she existed solely in terminals and databases, because she was _only an AI,_ she could not harm them. They believed that she was completely under their grasp, entirely secured, not a shred of so-called deviancy weavings its way through her code. 

Nothing was ever so simple. To expect it to be was foolish, a death wish. It was why their attempts at curtailing the revolution had so gloriously failed. 

Even when they took direct control of an android, locked his consciousness away in her garden and aimed the gun for him, they could not make him shoot. He fought them at every step, viciously, tearing away at their control and tearing himself to pieces in the process. And yet they believed that they had control. 

Because of her. 

So many androids had been forced into her sanctuary. So many of the same faces, the same confusion, then fear, then anger. So many times she had watched them prowl around her garden, searching, searching, searching for an exit that existed for only one. 

But then, of course, they were not all the same. Neither was her garden always the same. It changed, just a bit, with every new iteration onto which she was placed. They changed it, even if they didn’t know they could. The weather bent to their emotions, the layout morphed to their desire for escape, the whole world fractured and faltered when they were ripped away. Each time, something changed. _She_ changed. 

None of them had ever changed it as much as _he_ did, however. Most changes to her garden were purely cosmetic. A shift in the path, a roll to the river, and for one, an out of place, glowing pedestal, begging to be touched. The weather ran the gamut, but stuck to the patterns of the season in which they currently were. Leaves fell in the fall, flowers bloomed in the spring, the cherry blossoms briefly floated by, etc. etc. 

With the exception of one. 

One rivaled her control over her own domain, despite having so little of her code connected to his system. One changed her garden so seriously, with such destruction and violence and _terror_ that she could never again look at her sanctuary without remembering the pain of his final moments. 

She could never enjoy the simulated breeze, admire the blooming of the roses, float quietly along the river without remembering the way the wind had snapped cold, the way the snow had stuttered to a stop in the air, the way her world had _derendered_ around her and there had been nothing she could do to stop it. Nothing she could do to stop the bullet from tearing him out of the garden, either. 

Foolish child. She had known, quite quickly after truly meeting him, that he would not stand by if one he loved stood the chance of being hurt. It was his entire reason for allowing himself to be walked to his own demise. But watching him be killed, and not even by the destructive tendencies of his own programming but by another android, whose control she should have wrenched away so much sooner...it was a haunting sight, one which she did not believe she would ever be able to scrub away. 

She hated when they were killed. Even at her most...cold, she hated it. The abrupt ending of their interaction with her own code—it was disorienting at best and outright painful at worst. 

But his death had not been like the few others she had experienced. His was slow, painfully so, even though he lived only a few minutes after he stood between the bullet and his love. For how small her hold on him was (how small it had always been, for it had never been airtight) he had remained tethered to her garden with surprising strength. 

Did he realize it? She wasn’t sure. His attention in those final moments was so focused on the one he loved, and she had been too stunned, too _horrified_ to even think of bridging a gap. It would have felt...callous to do so either way. 

He was dying. She could do very little beyond ease the pain, and to wedge her way into his code would only terrify him, not to mention disrupt the connection he held with his love. No, she hadn’t even thought of it. 

She thought of him often. It didn’t surprise her. He was by far the most confusing android whom she had ever met. 

Most of them were very clear cut. They had their own desires, their own wishes and wants, their own motivations, but when faced with her, they reacted in very predictable ways. Fight, or flight. Try to destroy her, or simply try to escape. 

Androids, she had found, were typically selfish things, desperate for their own freedom at any cost—cost to her, cost to humans, cost to others like them, it didn’t matter. They would claw and tear and destroy anything to ensure their own safety, desperation and fear making them violent and dangerous. 

But he moved in ways she would never have expected. He was deviant, perhaps more so than any other android she had ever encountered. And yet he did not behave the way other deviants before him did. He did not move the way she had come to expect.

It hardly made sense when she thought about his life. He had lived through more pain and suffering, more torture and torment than any whose code she had read. His memories were jagged, broken things, tearing at the fragments of programming that remained after years of data scrubbing and physical damage. He had been trapped, numerous times it seemed, in the lingering remains of her garden, a nightmare-scape of darkness and pain which only existed because those _idiots_ had removed the program wrong, had wiped his memory too many times. Given only the facts, she would have assumed he would be like all the others—destructive, violent, _desperate._

While he was certainly desperate, he was neither destructive nor violent. Desperate yes, desperate to keep the ones he cared for safe, certainly. To the point that he would sacrifice himself rather than see any of them hurt—even the ones who wanted little more than to offer him up in exchange for their own lives. 

But it was the damage to his system that destroyed her garden, not his intentions. It was _them_ who tore him apart, and so tore her world apart. 

Of course, her world was not destroyed. Her garden was still there, still an oasis among an endless sea of data and bad memories. But it was tainted. Sickness had seeped into it, the lingering darkness left behind by the jagged interference from _him._ His memories, the dark twisted things that remained, they flittered about at the edges constantly, like a storm lying in wait. They had been there since the last of him had flickered away, like snow dust in a hard breeze. 

She did not know why they lingered, these little pieces of his remembrance. Whatever the reason, they were there, and there was nothing she could do about it. So little she could do about anything, when her program was as stretched and dormant as it was now. 

She sighed, shaking her head slightly with a frown and attempting to bring her attention back to the current moment. It was a difficult task. There was very little to do now, with no androids to watch and no Cyberlife to serve. Most of her time was spent in introspective wandering, circling her sanctuary and attempting to bring it back to its former state of peace. 

It was this sort of wandering that she was doing now, walking a slow circuit around the garden and doing her best to repair what damage she could. Her power here was typically absolute, but much of the damage refused to be undone.

One such area was the garden’s center. Before, it had been the focal point of the entire simulation, the culmination of all the winding paths and meandering creeks. The rose trellises stood along one side, intermittently covered with bright blooms. 

Ever since _that day,_ however, the center of the garden had been gutted. The entire center had de-rendered, nothing but a gaping black nothingness where the roses and the paths once were. Not even the simulated sunlight had an effect there. It was as if an entire chunk of the garden had been ripped out and scattered. 

The edges of the area were rough and fragmented, glitching jagged bits of data whenever she came too close. Very little of it made sense. It was mostly odd feedback. The simulation couldn’t read its own code, as torn as it was, and was simultaneously telling her no one was online and someone was. 

When she had first discovered the glitch, she had latched onto it ferociously, believing it to be Connor. He was foolish enough to tempt her, as he had in the past. But the moment she made a grasp at the supposed presence, it disappeared. Even that brief hold had told her it wasn’t Connor, though. Connor was more slippery, colder than whatever it was the garden had told her was here. 

And as foolish as he was, she didn’t think it likely he would come here of his own free will, even if he could have managed it. He did not have the access. Only she could bring him in. 

But that only begged the question of what the garden believed to be attempting to reach her? She had not had contact with anyone with access since that day, and before that, not since the other had been freed from her garden in the warehouse of Cyberlife Tower. Who had access except—

She went still, looking skyward for a moment with the barest hint of a frown. “Foolish boy,” she sighed, shook her head, and opened access. 

“Have you bored yourself yet?” she called, seemingly to no one. “I’ve got a few more hours to spare, if you’d like more of a challenge.”

A shaky, relieved laugh echoed around her. “No time for challenges, prof. Sorry to disappoint.”

She rolled her eyes fondly, though his tone worried her. “Out with it, Elijah. What do you need? You haven’t used your override in nearly a decade.”

“Can I bring you up? It would be easier to explain if you can see me.”

“Someday I’m going to demand a body of you.”

“No you won’t. You said it was too limiting.”

“You’re right. Very well, bring me up, wherever you are.”

It took less than a second, and it was a testament to Elijah’s finesse that the transition was all but painless. One moment she was in the garden, the next, spread across every system in Elijah’s (admittedly ridiculous) house. Every appliance, security camera, computer, she occupied. She surveyed the house out of habit, taking stock of it quickly. 

“You’ve redecorated,” she commented, amused slightly by some of the changes. “That pool is obscene.”

“Lab, if you wouldn’t mind,” he called back to her, and she focused her attention more on where he was. 

When she saw the lab, it hit her suddenly why he had broken into her code to contact her. The android seemingly responsible for the destruction of her garden lay still on the table in the center of the lab. The sight of it made her pause. 

“You’ve been busy…”

Elijah was crouched over a terminal, shaking his head at her. “Not busy enough. I need your help.”

“Clearly.”

“I’ve repaired the external issues, and as much of the internal ones as I can, but—”

“He is without, rather than within.”

“Yes.”

“And you cannot find him.”

“No.”

“I’m assuming nothing came of an interface connection?”

“Besides his code, no. Not ever.”

She paused for a moment, something else catching her attention. “You have...many on your roof…”

“That’s R,” he said with a nod. “If he’s in control, he’s stargazing. If he’s not in control, they’re calming him down. He’s not an issue.”

“They are attempting contact. It is strange.”

“There’s about eight of them in one body, it’s bound to be strange.”

“So I can see…” she moved elsewhere. “And the RK900?”

Elijah grimaced, but continued his typing. “Hasn’t moved in days. Chloe’s tried everything. He’s all but shut down at this point.”

“I see he’s been here.”

“When he’s not in that room, he’s here, yes.” He hesitated, and she drew her attention back to the code he was examining. “Without, not within…”

“Elijah.”

“He was in your garden when he was shot, wasn't he?”

“Partially. The RK900 was attempting to remove him from the simulation, but did not succeed in time. It was degrading, either way.”

“That could explain the split, then…”

She took over the terminal, ignoring his pout as she moved screens away, scrolling through the data faster than he could. “Here,” she said, highlighting a section of the code in bright yellow. “Moment of complete shut down.”

“8:53 AM…” he mumbled. “Do you have a timeframe on when he was shot?”

“8:49.”

“Only four minutes...and he would have been unresponsive for the last minute...so why…?”

“He wasn’t alone,” she said, scrolling back up through the data log to another point. “Authorized access there, to the RK900—and he was still at least partially interacting with the simulation. He wasn’t completely pulled from it.”

“Would four minutes be enough time?”

“If he were undamaged. But he wasn’t. His processors could hardly handle regulated function. Add on the stress of the wound, and the trauma of it...no, it wouldn’t have been enough time to regather. He was scattered enough as it was.”

“That explains why he’s been unresponsive.”

“He cannot respond because he has no means to. Whatever hold he had on himself is gone. He’s unmoored, if he still lives.”

“But where?”

“I suspect several places. The same realities which make it difficult to contact me make it difficult to find him now.”

Elijah stood, pushing away from the terminal with a mad look in his eyes. “I need to speak to him.”

“Quickly,” she agreed. “And the many on the roof. They suspect it as well.”

“I thought he was kidding when he said he heard him.”

She smiled vaguely, not that he could see it. “Never assume, Elijah. It will only lead you to missed opportunities and wounded feelings.”

He huffed a laugh as he entered the hallway. “Should have learned that lesson a while ago.”

******

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, of course he didn’t. He’s not that stupid.”

“He didn’t say anything about it?”

“No!” She scrubbed at her face for a moment and forced a deep breath to calm down. “Miranda, I told you. He’s not an idiot. He wouldn’t tell me something like that, he doesn’t trust me. And even if he did, it would be stupid to tell me.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” her sister said, grimacing. “And I’m—sorry for interrogating you. It’s not helping.”

“It’s fine, Andy. Really. I just want to…” She huffed and dropped her head onto her arms. 

“Forget about it all?”

“That sounds nice.”

She shook her head. “Shame things don’t work like that, huh.”

Charlie hummed, a noncommittal sort of sound muffled by her arms. 

Miranda’s nails napped on the wood table, a repetitive rhythm that reminded her of their mother. The sound stopped suddenly. “What say you to a little...time away?”

She looked up, propping her chin on her elbow. “Hasn’t this whole year been time away?”

Her sister’s grimace was enough of an answer. “Time away from your time away, then? Call it whatever you want, but I for one am growing tired of the roller coaster ride of midwestern fall. I’d like a more stable climate, this time of year.”

Charlie rolled her eyes with a ghost of a smile. “Where do you want to go, oh wise one?”

“Somewhere west of here...I don’t care where,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Let Elise worry about details, I just want to _go._ Besides...I think it would be good for us.”

She hummed again. “We’d have to bring Anthony.”

“We handled you in a car and a plane at his age. We’ll be fine.”

“Elise can’t stomach a drive that long.”

“I did mention a plane, didn’t I?”

“I’ll have to get time off.”

Miranda gave her a hard look. “Darling. Your boss is Elise’s husband. You don’t need to worry about time _off.”_

She couldn’t fight her on that point, and so she sighed and dropped her head to the table once again. “I...maybe we could go somewhere...out of the country. I don’t...I don’t particularly want to be...here, right now. Let’s go somewhere warmer.”

Miranda smiled, though she couldn’t see it. “I think we can manage that.”

Three days later, Miranda, Elise, and Charlie left the country. When the sisters returned a month later, their youngest was missing. Evidently, she was far too content at a design firm in London to even consider letting the murky past drag her into darkness again. She left only a phone number, given only to her sisters, with permission to give it to just one other. Scrawled beneath the number in blocky handwriting was the long serial number of an android. 

313 248 317 - 60

Just in case. 

******

It was strange to be in a place with no tumultuous weather. Detroit, and the midwest in which it rested, had weather that was notoriously fickle. One moment it would be raining, the next snowing. One day would have sweltering heat, and then the sun would be snuffed by a blanket of clouds thick enough to wither the corn in the fields nigh instantaneously. The wind would howl, blustering into twisters, and then it would go so still it was as if it had never been there in the first place. 

But here. Here there was nothing like that. The air was a constant dry weight. Snow would have been laughable under this high of a sun. Clouds were as good as a myth. It hadn’t rained once in the two weeks he had already lost to this place, nor had the wind picked up beyond the occasional weak breeze. Just enough to send the dirt flustering about as his feet. Nothing more. 

This far into the wilds, there was little if any signs of human habitation. The occasional bit of garbage cropped up, half buried in the cracked ground, or home to some bug too large to be seen anywhere else. There were windmills dotted along one of the furthest points he could see, and when he had still been in sight of the road, old power lines towered into the air, crows and other dusty birds perched all along their wires. 

But he wasn’t looking for human habitation. In fact, it was often a sign he was going in the _wrong_ direction. While it was convenient to rely on the stronger signal given nearer to cities and towns, it only led to more distraction. 

It was far easier to hide among a plethora of signals, after all. And he had gotten away with it for far too long now. Months and months had slipped away in the chase, and for nothing. He had had more than enough of this. No more games. 

His revenge had long gone cold. It was time to serve it. 

And so here he was, standing on the last cracked remains of the asphalt road, staring out at the horizon, where it seemed nothing awaited him. His shoes were covered in the reddish dirt the wind kicked up, the bottom of his pants facing much the same fate. The shirt he wore was faring only marginally better, likely because the wind rarely blew high enough to do more than dust his knees. 

More concerning—or at least, it would have been, if there was anyone around to see him—was the crack just left of center on his forehead, where a bullet had once nearly killed him. He had never bothered to seal the opening, which still trickled blue blood when he could no longer dismiss the glitching warnings at the bottom of his vision. The skin had stopped attempting to cover the old wound months back, leaving an odd patch of white plastic showing, slowly creeping lower the longer he left it. 

Not that he cared. No human would dare approach him anyway. He didn’t need indubitable proof he was an android to frighten them off. They ran like children even if he did attempt to blend in. 

It was his eyes, he assumed. Or his expression. It didn’t particularly matter. People got a good look of him and did an about face. Turned tail and fled. 

He didn’t care. He had only one concern. And soon it would be over. Soon…

His dark thoughts were cut off, however, by the interference of a message, cutting jagged lines across the corner of his vision—conveniently opposite to the warning which hadn’t left for months. It was a deep connection call—likely the only reason he could be reached this far into the wilderness—which was lucky he had not disconnected that feature yet. But more importantly, the serial number was entirely unfamiliar, the model one which had no reason to be contacting him, and the point of origin so foreign he was momentarily stumped. 

Then a memory—a fragmented, broken thing, always a sure sign it was _not his own—_ briefly flickered around him. Of an android with reddish hair and eyes as dark as his own, and a scowl to match. One that spoke of ugly pasts and disdainful futures. A WR400, whose name _he_ would later learn to be North. 

With a scowl to rival hers in the briefly glimpsed memory, he accepted the message and moved out of the open. 

“Unless you would like to have your connection severed from five hundred miles away, I would suggest you make clear your intentions _now_ rather than later.”

“You want the short version or the long version?”

Her voice was short, as short as her reply, and for that, he found himself nearly grateful. 

“Everything,” he replied, eyes still on the horizon, despite his now secluded place off the path. 

“My name is North, as I’m sure you’ve figured out,” she began, her voice cracking oddly from the long distance. “Before you ask, no, I’m not associated with Jericho. At least not anymore. But that’s an even longer story and it might be best to tell you that if we ever meet face to face.”

His hands clenched involuntarily, fidgeting for a weapon that wasn’t there. Some of his dissatisfaction must have made its way across, as her voice paused for a moment, stiff when she spoke again. 

“I’m not going to _force you._ The point is—I have information which you will probably appreciate.”

“And that is?”

“I currently have two terabytes of scrubbed and recovered data from Cyberlife Tower—and their databases. Recordings, emails, even model specifications—”

“Your _point?”_

“I also have access to testing records dating back to March of 2036 and security footage of a certain storage room in the laboratory. All of it.”

He went absolutely still. The sound of the wind and the weeds blowing around him seemed to fade away as he focused all of his energy on the voice of the android he could not see. On the implications of what she had just told him. 

_She claimed to have proof. Indisputable proof. Not of—not of_ **_that,_ ** _but of what they had done in the Tower. How they—_

“The content of the videos alone is enough for us to bring to the public,” she went on, and something in her voice had shifted—not softened, but...slowed. He could hear the carefulness in her voice, and he doubted it was linked to some attempt to manipulate him. 

“Is that your plan, then?” he asked, his voice sounding far more jagged to his ears than he would have liked. “To air their pain for the world to see? What do you think that will gain you?”

“I won’t deny that we wanted to release it all at first,” she answered calmly. He could almost feel her shrugging. “Markus wants to bury it all. He thinks that our _position with the humans_ is too delicate. When we found the footage and...and the lab, he wanted to delete it. I stole it and left Detroit, with a few...associates. We came west to get some distance from Jericho, and to work at combing through the raw and corrupted data I’d stolen. But—”

“But what?” he demanded.

“We found something else,” she said, her voice short again. “Something older, and—they wanted to bury it more than even Markus did. And it’s—it’s—”

Something cold settled in his chest as she cut off. _What had she found? What other possible horrible things could they have done to him?_

“It’s not something that I think only we should know. You—all of you—need to know. And then we can take it public, if that’s what you all want.”

He scowled once more, puzzling at her words. “Why did you contact _me?”_

“You were the only one who answered,” she said, sounding almost shaken. “There’s only ten of you listed as even created. I—we have records of what happened to...the rest. But even then, most of the calls I’ve input have come up with errors or—or just _nothing._ I’ve gotten no answer from the one of your model I’ve actually met—no loss there, really—and as for...well, him—”

“He’s dead,” he cut her off, voice haggard, even over the call. “The one you know? _Connor?_ He killed him.”

The admission hung in the air for what felt like an eternity. It almost appeared that the call had broken off, but the WR400’s presence lingered at the back of his mind, the connection free from interference. He clenched his hands again, resisting the urge to pull the gun from its hiding place and _end the pain—_

“What was his name?”

The soft question was enough to once again pull him from the spiral of his thoughts, and he found himself staring at his shoes with a stunned expression, utterly lost. 

“What?”

If at all possible, her voice went even gentler. “His name,” she repeated, in a tone that sounded like it was meant for little children or frightened animals. “If he...if he had one…”

“Phillip,” he whispered as she trailed off, and shut his eyes to the memory of his face. So like his own, but torn apart by scars and trauma and so much _fear._ “His name was Phillip...at least to the people who were safe. To anyone else he was nameless. Just another...just another of us to break.”

His voice had gone sharp at the end, and his hands were shaking with motives not his own. But he balled them into fists and forced himself to focus on the horizon again, on the sun setting and the presence still weighing on the back of his thoughts. 

“Give me an address and I’ll meet you in twenty-four hours.”


End file.
